28 



THE FLORAL WORLD AND GARDEN GUIDE. 



IMPROVING COLLECTIONS OF FRUIT. 



N most cases of complaint about fruit failures, 

 people have themselves to blame only, and, per- 

 haps, there is no one department of horticul- 

 ture in which more mistakes are made than in the 

 management of hard}' fruits. Four j'ears ago, I 

 came into the possession of a piece of ground of 



about thirty acres, at R , near Southampton. 



For distinction's sake, the place is called a fruit 

 garden, but about one-third of the ground is 

 devoted to rotation cropping, and we find mangels, 

 swedes, Italian rye-grass, and market vegetables, 

 to pay best ; and we keep five cows, and generally 

 half-a-dozen breeding pigs. When I took pos- 

 session, there was an immense stock of apple, 

 pear, plum, and currant trees on the ground ; 

 they had been well planted originally, but for 

 ten years, at least, had been going steadily to 

 ruin. The trees were cankered ; the bush fruits had grown into a wilderness ; 

 the apples were eaten up with American blight, and their trunks were blotched 

 all over with running sores ; it was truly disheartening to go over the ground 

 and see the havoc that time, assisted by neglect, had made. The ground 

 varies a good deal as to level, and there is scarcely half-an-acre that can 

 be called flat ; the higher parts are a rich loam, resting on clay, and these 

 shelve down in trowel- shaped slopes to the river, where the land gets more 

 clayey, and is occasionally flooded. On one good piece, lying towards one 

 of the lower levels, there were originally five hundred orchard apple trees, 

 mostly Keswick and Manx Codlings; and on another piece, placed rather 

 higher, a large stock of Ribstone and Golden Pippins, all terribly cankered, 

 and seemingly unable to produce another fruit as long as they should 

 continue to linger. By cutting a few trenches, the first autumn, we made 

 acquaintance with the nature of the sub-soil, and saw what was the first 

 thing to be done ; the trees were, on the lower piece, perishing of cold 

 feet ; they had, in fact, sent their roots down into a bog, and had but few 

 surface fibres. There were six acres on one slope with a good fall, and 

 here we made our first step in draining. We drained the whole with four-inch 

 pipes, putting a row of pipes between each row of trees, at thirty-five feet dis- 

 tance, and then proceeded to dress the surface soil. On one part of the ground 

 was an immense heap of rubbish, chiefly road-scrapings and turf; this was 

 turned over and wheeled on to the ground, and with it all the manure we 

 could scrape together. We then spread this mixture of manure and turfy rub- 

 bish under the trees, about four inches thick, and forked the ground regularly 

 all over, and round every tree cut a trench, so as to shorten in all the 

 roots. A few of the worst at the lowest part we treated differently, for 

 at one side of each we worked away till we got to the tap roots, and these 

 we cut through with a chisel, so as to cut off all connection between the tree 

 and the lower stratum of the soil. On the ground higher up, we contented 

 ourselves with waiting till December, and then we removed the top soil from 

 around every tree, and ridged it up, so as to expose the roots to the frost. At 

 the end of January, during mild weather, we commenced a general cleaning 

 and pruning. We made an immense quantity of lime-paint, as follows : — To 

 every bushel of lime we added four pounds of flower of sulphur, mixed the 

 whole with water into a thick paint, and, after scraping off" the loose bark, 

 painted every tree with it. Those that had been bared to the roots we painted 

 as low down as possible, and then returned the earth that had been ridged up. 



